tiste?....
Non.... Tant mieux. J'ai contre tout artiste une haine implacable!_ was
spoken in a manner which bared the woman's heart to the sophisticated.
The scene in which she sang the song of the _Magali_ (the Provencal
melody which Mistral immortalized in a poem, which Gounod introduced
into _Mireille_, and which found its way, inexplicably, into the ballet
of Berlioz's _Les Troyens a Carthage_), playing her own accompaniment,
to Jean, was really too wonderful a caricature of the harlot. Abel
Faivre and Paul Guillaume have done no better. The scene in which Fanny
reviles her former associates for telling Jean the truth about her past
life was revolting in its realism.

If Miss Garden spared no details in making us acquainted with Fanny's
vulgarity, she was equally fair to her in other respects. She seemed to
be continually guiding the spectator with comment something like this:
"See how this woman can suffer, and she is a woman, like any other
woman." How small the means, the effect considered, by which she
produced the pathos of the last scene. At the one performance I saw half
the people in the audience were in tears. There was a dismaying display
of handkerchiefs. Sapho sat in the window, smoking a cigarette,
surveying the room in which she had been happy with Jean, and preparing
to say good-by. In the earlier scenes her cigarette had aided her in
making vulgar gestures. Now she relied on it to tell the pitiful tale of
the woman's loneliness. How she clung to that cigarette, how she sipped
comfort from it, and how tiny it was! Mary Garden's Sapho, which may
never be seen on the stage again (Massenet's music is perhaps his
weakest effort), was an extraordinary piece of stage art. That alone
would have proclaimed her an interpreter of genius.

[Illustration: MARY GARDEN AS FANNY LEGRAND

_from a photograph by Mishkin (1909)_]

George Moore, somewhere, evolves a fantastic theory that a writer's name
may have determined his talent: "Dickens--a mean name, a name without
atmosphere, a black out-of-elbows, back-stairs name, a name good enough
for loud comedy and louder pathos. John Milton--a splendid name for a
Puritan poet. Algernon Charles Swinburne--only a name for a reed through
which every wind blows music.... Now it is a fact that we find no fine
names among novelists. We find only colourless names, dry-as-dust names,
or vulgar names, round names like pot-hats, those names like
mackintoshes, names that are squa